Information Kerala Mission (IKM) for strengthening decentralisation and local democracy in Kerala.

The impact of Information Kerala Mission, being a sequel to the decentralisation programme, has to be judged in the context of the experiments of decentralisation in Kerala. Extent of decentralisation and its quality can be gauged from the following: (1) In the health sector all institutions other than medical colleges and big regional speciality hospitals have been placed under the control of the local governments. (2) In the education sector, in rural areas the high schools have been transferred to the District Panchayats, and the primary and upper primary schools to Village Panchayats; in urban areas, all schools have been transferred to the urban local bodies. (3) The entire responsibility of poverty alleviation has gone to the local governments; all the centrally sponsored anti-poverty programmes are planned and implemented through them. (4) As regards social welfare, barring statutory functions relating to juvenile justice, the entire functions have gone to local governments. The Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) is fully implemented by Village Panchayats and Urban Local Bodies. Care of the disabled, to a substantial degree has become a local government responsibility. (5) In the agriculture and allied sectors, the following have become the defacto and de jure local government functions. ^ Agricultural extension including farmer oriented support for increasing production and productivity. ^ Watershed management and minor irrigation. ^ Dairy development. ^ Animal husbandry including veterinary care. ^ Inland fisheries. Studies on decentralisation in Kerala reveals that: (1) It has served to increase the outreach of developmental services. (2) It has resulted in substantially increased earmarking of funds to the disadvantaged groups and in achieving greater equity. (3) A series of locally appropriate affordable solutions for development problems. (4) There was a high level of realisms in tackling problems of poverty. No tall promises were made. (5) The opportunities for participation has helped the poor in gaining confidence and moving into higher forms of direct social action like management of facilities and demand for services. (6) The participation of people have improved accountability. The Information Kerala Mission had tried to support the decentralisation initiative primarily in building up an information package for monitoring the progress of the experiment, especially the implementation of development projects. All documentation/ databases on financial physical targets and achievements of Kerala decentralisation have been compiled, consolidated using IKM applications. The Information Kerala Mission working on the recommendations on the Committee on Decentralisation of Powers dealing with administrative reforms has worked out a practical strategy of implementing reforms through a package of application suites covering every facet of local government functioning. The packages have been developed through an action research strategy and fully implemented in selected locations as detailed below. The task that remains is to scale this up fully. Service delivery was an area which decentralised plan campaign had neglected during its initial years. The mission group had substantially worked on this and evolved specific programmes for alternate service delivery. Building up fairness and equality in delivery of public services including development services is the crucial value add to the decentralisation programme from this. It was the comprehensiveness of the ICT intervention and the overall impact that earned IKM the prestige of being cited as a promising case study under the theme e-government in ICT Success Stories Themes, by the Strategy Policy Unit of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The impact of specific projects implemented has been as follows. 1. Janasevanakendrams The Janasevanakendrams are alternate service delivery facilities with a brand identity of a citizen friendly front office with a common scheme for interiors, better ambience, air conditioning facility, seating for the citizen, drinking water and toilet facilities along with trained functionaries providing ICT based services in a responsive manner. 1.1 Quantitative aspects: No. of sites: 60 Area: 3580.39 sq.m No. of computerised counters: 2 – 10 per location Seating for customer: 6 – 20 per location Automated queue management (selected locations) 1.2 Indicator :: impact Customer feedback on general quality:: Customer feedback shows acceptance of improved ambience in all locations. Customer feedback on improvement of services :: Perceptible improvement of services in 60% cases (Main reason for reduced impact being non-availability of legacy data in electronic form) 2. Sevana (Birth, Death and Marriage) The civil registration system handles essential statutory documents relating to citizenship, age, name, parental details, place of birth, financial rights etc. Kerala State has achieved a unique status in birth registration with 92% of the births and 90% of the deaths being registered. Kerala has the largest emigrant population of 1.4 million with current annual migration of nearly one hundred thousand. Birth and Marriage certificates are invariably required by them. Every year 0.5 million children get enrolled in schools. All of them require birth certificates. Number of death registrations come to nearly 0.2 million every year. Thus on an average 25 persons out of 1000 require these services every year. For the same reason civil registration has emerged as a priority area for computerisation by LSGs. Birth, Death and Marriage registration using Sevana is one of the main services provided through 'Janasevanakendrams'. Birth and death registration using Sevana is the service provided in 'Hospital Kiosks'. The application 'Sevana' won national award for the best user friendly application (CSI-TCS Award 2002). 2.1 Quantitative aspects: No. of sites: 239 No. of registrations: 1418544 No. of certificates issued: 543669 2.2 Indicator :: impact Time for issuing new certificate :: Reduced from 4 – 5 days to 5 hours Time for issuing old certificate :: Reduced by 50% 3. Sevana Pension Kerala has the most comprehensive safety net for vulnerable sections in the society. Kerala was the first state to have introduced agriculture workers’ pension. 3.6 million people are benefited through different pension schemes, which include schemes for widows, destitute, senior citizens, unemployed and for the mentally and physically challenged. A sizeable amount of these programmes have been transferred to local governments. Poor administration of the social welfare pension programmes have resulted in substantial delays in payment of pensions, and complaints of duplications, defalcations also come up regularly. The Sevana Pension application is aimed at streamlining the disbursement of social welfare benefits to the poorest of the poor in the society. 3.1 Quantitative aspects: No. of sites: 7 No. of pensioners: 16270 No. of unemployment dole earners: 12741 3.2 Indicator :: impact Time for disbursement of pension after order :: Reduced from 10 days to 5 hours Time for disbursement of dole after order :: Reduced from 4 days to 1 day 4. Saankhya and Sahatha With the devolution of substantial resources to the local governments an average local government which was handling half a million Indian Rupees has started handling nearly ten fold of the amount. Most of the local governments are facing shortage of manpower in handling day to day operations resulting in substantial delays in closing of annual accounts. The Saankhya and Sahatha applications are aimed at addressing this. 4.1 Quantitative aspects: No. of sites: 22 No. of transactions: 1068334 Total amount transacted: Rs.2038 million 4.2 Indicator :: impact Time for daily statement generation :: Reduced from one hour to few minutes Time for consolidated statement :: Reduced from one hour to few minutes 5. Sulekha Devolution of nearly a quarter of the state's development budget to local governments had been one of the most striking aspect of Kerala’s decentralisation. Compared to centralised plan implementation where a few development departments had been handling 10 to 20 projects each. In the new scenario, 1223 entities have started handling nearly 0.18 million projects altogether. Kerala is one of the first states to have introduced ‘Right to Information’ much before the Government of India decided on this. Accountability requirements of local governments have also enhanced substantially in the light of the requirements for decentralised plan administration by local governments. The projects vary in complexity from very simple projects for disbursement of benefits in multi-tier multi-agency integrated projects. Sulekha is the developmental information systems for the local government plan projects addressing the felt needs of the local community identified through a grassroots level appraisal strategy. Monitoring of developmental projects with focus on Gender budgeting, slum development, urban planning, environmental appraisal, projects included in the anti poverty sub-plan and those having an impact on children and the aged are given special attention. 5.1 Quantitative aspects: No. of sites: 1223 (online 125) No. of projects: 427388 Total outlay: Rs. 88106.4 million 5.2 Indicator :: impact Time for consolidating monthly statement on financial and physical achievements :: Reduced from over a month to few minutes 6. Sthapana The local government employees number 20,000, and transferred employees are estimated to be around 86,000. Handling of service matters of these employees had been a traditional function of local governments. A host of human resource management responsibilities relative to building skills in developmental functioning, service delivery, and financial management have meanwhile started emerging at the local government level. Service matters of transferred employees continue to be part of their departments. However their capability building responsibilities are handled by local governments themselves. The Sthapana application right now covers payroll, and is being upgraded to handle the establishment matters and functions. 6.1 Quantitative aspects: No. of sites: 60 No. of employees: 10290 6.2 Indicator :: impact Time for monthly pay bill generated :: Reduced from two days to few minutes No. of staff required for operation :: Reduced to one-tenth 7. Soochika Crippled with inadequately trained staff and archaic office systems, the administrative machinery in local governments is finding it difficult to implement the decentralisation programme as well as to open out to the common man. A cursory glance at the institutional mechanisms available in the local governments reveals the following, as recorded starkly in the 'Report of the Committee on Decentralisation' instituted by the Government of Kerala: "Files are not properly kept, registers are not up to date and transactions are often elaborated without reasoning. A variety of reasons have contributed to this state of affairs- pressure of work, imprecise instructions from above, untrained staff, ineffective supervision, impractical procedures and corrupt intentions." Skill levels of local government personnel is inadequate and they are finding it difficult to cope up with the increasing number of files and transactions. Frequently priorities are overlooked and substantial delays in grievance handling result. Soochika is an effort to address these. 7.1 Quantitative aspects: No. of sites: 4 No. of sites with touch screen for grievance status search facility: 1 No. of transactions: 17864 7.2 Indicator :: impact Time for status search :: Reduced from over a day to few seconds 8. Sakarma The responsibilities of local government councils and grass root level fora have substantially increased in areas of decision making and the need for keeping clear and complete records of the decisions have become more and more significant. The application Sakarma is a decision support system creation tool relying on recording agenda notes for meetings, as well as minutes, mapped to a series of keywords based on which precedences and best practices in decision making could be identified and shared across local governments. 8.1 Quantitative aspects: No. of sites: 3 No. of transactions: 824 8.2 Indicator :: impact Time for locating a decision point :: Reduced from more than a week to a few minutes 9. Sanchaya Resources devolved to local government in Kerala includes various taxes and non tax components levied from the public. In terms of per capita tax mobilisation Kerala stands out as the highest in the country, double the next highest and several fold the national average. Management of resource mobilisation is very critical from the point of local governments, both from a view of continuing with the development efforts and for financing the rising costs for maintaining community assets and performance of the social services sector. The application Sanchaya operates in this very critical area of local government operation. 9.1 Quantitative aspects: No. of sites: 5 No. of stakeholders: Property tax – 575359; Profession tax – 20212; D&O license – 19525 9.2 Indicator :: impact Time for demand generation :: Demand generation reduced from one month to a few minutes Time for arrear statement generation :: Arrear statement generation reduced from several months to few minutes Increase in projected demand due to streamlining of records :: 15% to 30% 10. Sanchitha Decentralisation experiment in Kerala, being implemented in an action research mode, had generated huge volumes of documentation in the form of acts, rules, allied acts, government orders etc. during a short span. Sanchitha has archived them as a multimedia CD product. 10.1 Quantitative aspects: No. of sites: 60 Database size: 223 MB 10.2 Indicator :: impact Time for locating a relevant document :: Reduced from a few days to few minutes. 11. Samoohya Building up a community database and baseline information system for micro level planning had for long been identified as a major step for streamlining public services and development planning. Samoohya is a one time exercise of building up a community database through a primary survey bridging transactional data handled by local governments like electoral records, ration card, Below Poverty Line (BPL) data, property tax data, data on enterprises relating to dangerous and offensive trades, other trades etc. The application creates a community database with a citizen ID with the objective of finally linking them to a citizen portal. 11.1 Quantitative aspects: No. of sites: 2 Database size: 127 MB 11.2 Indicator :: impact Non-electronic equivalent not available for benchmarking 12. Saphalya Kerala has the highest rates of unemployment in the country in both rural and urban areas and the number of work seekers have touched a staggering figure of 4 million in 2004. The percentage of educated unemployed in Kerala is also very high. It was in this context that an employment portal was visualised. This gains more significance in the context of implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme of the Government of India being implemented in two districts. 12.1 Quantitative aspects: No. of sites: 2 No. of transactions: 3324 Database size: 47 MB No. of beneficiaries: 2712 12.2 Indicator :: impact Non-electronic equivalent not available for benchmarking